CBQoS - an Overview

CBQoS (Class Based Quality of Service) is a Cisco feature set that is part of the IOS 12.4(4) T and above. This provides information about the QoS policies applied and class based traffic patterns within an enterprise's network.

How Network administrators Benefit from CBQoS?

If you opt to monitor your network with CBQoS, along with Cisco's NetFlow technology, you can achieve an additional insight into your organization's business critical applications utilization. The CBQoS can be utilized to show how these applications are delivered across an infrastructure with defined policies. It is generally available at no additional cost. The QoS statistics provided by CBQoS are made available via SNMP polling and give detailed information about the defined QoS policies applied to interfaces and class-based traffic patterns.

A distinctive network that has no defined QoS policies can run with a best-effort delivery, with all traffic having equal priority and an equal chance of being delivered. But, in case if such a network becomes congested, all traffic also has an equal chance of being dropped. The definition of policies (class-maps defined in policy-maps) allows specific traffic to be prioritized according to its relative importance and uses congestion-avoidance to ensure its delivery.

IT360 and Cisco CBQoS Reporting

ManageEngine IT360 has a provision for Cisco CBQoS by which it generates reports on the QoS policies that you have deployed. The report is all about the pre-policy, post-policy and drops in different traffic class along with queuing. CBQoS monitoring in such a deep level helps you validate the QoS policies. You can change your policies according to the reports, which you see in IT3. This is a tool, which can be best used for QoS policy validation

Features

CBQoS can be used to limit the amount of bandwidth for certain network traffic, thereby making network performance more predictable and utilization more efficient.

CBQoS can be used to ensure network applications, such as VoIP and video conferencing receive the highest priority.

It provides an in-depth look at the amount of traffic used, both before it is filtered through a policy (pre-policy) and after it has been filtered (post-policy). If any of the traffic was dropped during congestion because of the rules defined in a policy, CBQoS reports the amount of traffic that was dropped.